LOS ANGELES  After poor performance by the summers most heavily
hyped films, like "Deep Impact," "Godzilla," and
"Armageddon," the major studios are banking on a strong August to salvage
profits for the season. Hollywood is betting that heavy industry, particularly mining,
will provide an irresistible draw for the movie-going public.

Certainly the most anticipated of the films is the recently completed "The
Mine." The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the dashing and overly idealistic Ralph
Voorhees, a project manager fresh from the Colorado School of Mines, who attempts to bring
jobs and hope to a dying Minnesota town with the opening of a 245,000-square-foot strip
mine. John Malkovich stars opposite as the villainous "De Vrank," a cold-blooded
environmental activist who is determined to stop the destruction of the bird sanctuary on
which the mine is to be situated  by any means necessary.

In the past, studio executives have been reluctant to rely on heavy industry as a lead
film genre. Skeptics point to the summer of 1983 which featured several films based on
petroleum engineering and refining, particularly the conflict between fractional
distillation and solvent extraction and crystallization. Martin Scorseses "The
Refinery," while named Best Picture of 1983, was only a modest success at the box
office. And that years other refinery-related films  "The Refiners,"
"Indiana Jones and the Refinery" and the Merchant-Ivory adaptation "A Room
with a View of the Refinery"  were all considered disappointments.

Yet the stunning success of several independent mining films at this years
Sundance and Cannes film festivals forced Hollywood to reconsider their position. Belgian
filmmaker Jean-Luc Exelmanss short film "Perspectives on the Frasch Process in
Copper Leaching and Heavy Element Precipitator Extraction" won the prestigious Golden
Palm at Cannes, and Thomas Ludbecks documentary "Ore," a scathing
examination of the reliance on sublevel drift-caving in the Alsatian coal industry, was
received with universal praise.

Another film slated for release this summer is Jane Campions "Far from the
Madding Crowd of Metallurgical Engineers," a loose adaptation of the Thomas Hardy
novel. In the film Bathsheba, played by Kate Winslet, must choose between the affections
of three suitors, a trio of Welsh mining engineers, each of whom has a different plan to
revive the massive tin-extracting and smelting plant that the orphaned Yorkshire heroine
relies on for subsistence. The film is widely viewed as an allegory comparing the rival
longwall mining, room-and-pillar mining and cut-and-fill mining schools favored by Timothy
Dalton, Alec Guinness and Robert Redford, repsectively, in the film.

Questions have been raised about the publics interest in the fine details of ore
extraction processes, but Paramount Vice-president Bernie Silverstam thinks the time for
mining films is now. "Frankly there is a lot of support in the public for heavy
industry at the moment," he told the Weekly Week in a recent interview. "Most
Americans know all too well that 18 percent of all non-service sector employment in this
country relies directly or indirectly on the extraction and smelting of metal compounds,
sulfur and coal."

When asked whether The American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum
Engineers had influenced public opinion by its massive new ad campaign, "Mining
 It Works," Silverstam declined to comment. "Lets just say," he
remarked with a grin, "that if mining doesnt work out, hydroelectric
engineering is a sure thing."